By Fumei Shirokuro
On December 5th or 6th Saint Nicholas is really celebrated; we then celebrate the birthday of Saint Nicholas. At least that’s what we tell the children. In truth it’s the death day of Saint Nicholas, since he died on December 6th. In the Netherlands, it differs for each household when they exactly celebrate it. Most Dutch households celebrate it the evening of December 5th. But in Belgium, they mostly celebrate it the morning of December 6th.
Traditional Dutch Candy for this holiday are Speculoos, Pepernoten, and Kruidnoten. At least those are a few of the examples that I like. Others are chocolate letters (which is also yum), a banketletter (which I don’t like), Buttertablet (also not on my yum list), Marzipan (I also don’t like this) and Taaitaai (which I sometimes like). There are tons more candy for this holiday, but these are the most common ones! Just for you guys I’m going to tell you the recipe for baking Kruidnoten, since they are really easy to make and very yummy!!
Ingredients
- 100gram of margarine
- 250 gram of self-rising flour
- 3 spoons of milk
- 2 spoons of speculoos spices (or pumpkin pie spices)
- 125 gram of muscovado (the darkest brown sugar) (you can also use cane sugar)
- A little bit of salt
So did you find all the ingredients? I don’t know how hard it is for you guys to get your hands on speculoos spices! I hope it isn’t too hard! So if you have everything, let’s get starting to making the kruidnoten.
- First of warm the oven at 150 degrees Celsius. Grease in a cookie sheet or use some baking paper.
- If you’re done with that put the flour in a bowl and make a small pit in the flour.
- Put the sugar, butter, speculoos spices, a little bit of salt and the milk in the pit.
- Start to mix the ingredients with your hands through the flour. And knead the dough until it’s a flexible dough.
- Wet your hands and roll little marble-sized balls from the dough. A good size is 1/2 inch.
- Place the dough balls on the cookie sheet. With your thumb, press them gently down so you flatten each cookie slightly.
- Bake for about 20 minutes, or until the cookies puff up and turn a slightly darker shade of brown. Let them then cool down.
Also, if you are a real chocoholic, there is an alternative way to make the Kruidnoten. Melt some chocolate and dip the cooled down kruidnoten in them. This way you will have chocolate kruidnoten, which are also awesome to eat! And you can use either dark, milk or white chocolate for this ;)
Enjoy this awesome Dutch holiday candy!